Page 65 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

44 Mapping approaches and themes

Overall, Herman and Chomsky assert that ‘the “societal purpose” of the media is to
inculcate and defend the economic, social and political agenda of privileged groups
that dominate the domestic economy and the state’ (1988: 298). The propaganda
model has been applied and defended by radical media scholars, particularly in
studies of the mobilisation of support for war, government information campaigns
and corporate PR (Source Watch 2013). Arguably, the key strength of this work is
to trace, through media output, what Klaehn (2009: 44) calls ‘the symbiotic rela-
tionship between journalists and agents of power’, but this is also the grounds for its
strongest critique.

Criticisms
The explanatory reach of the propaganda model is a common source of critique
but also a useful and productive basis for rehabilitation. The PM proposes a
strong, systemic and near totalistic account of media processes. Yet the empirical
basis for the original study is almost exclusively coverage in influential, elite news
media in the United States, predominantly addressing the foreign policy activities
and interests of America during the Cold War. Even strong critics such as McNair
(2006) acknowledge the salience of their account of a narrow, disciplined and
conformist US media between the 1940s and the 1980s. The tendency to shift
from this specific conjunction to make broader systemic claims is rightly criticised.
It is questionable how far the PM is applicable to other areas of US news coverage,
let alone news coverage from other media systems, and non-news media output.
Beyond the important critiques of extrapolation (from specific media conjunction to
general, and from content to influence) a more concretely situated analysis, alert to
the particular political economic factors and other influences on media output, leaves
open for examination how other media configurations relate to the ones Herman
and Chomsky describe. How does the PM relate to systems with significant publicly
owned as well as private media? For its advocates the propaganda model is interna-
tional in ‘scope and applicability’ (Klaehn 2009: 49; Klaehn 2010), yet while some
filters have wide applicability taken together they map, at best, multi-party liberal
systems in advanced capitalist economies. Moreover, the actual application of the
model to other media systems tends to overstate the degree of correspondence
with the US corporate model that the propaganda model identifies and critiques.
A second area of criticism concerns what Schudson (2000: 180) calls ‘flat-
footed functionalism’. In partial defence, it is important to consider the ambition
of the propaganda model. It seeks explanations for recurrent patterns of reporting
identified through empirical research. It aims to offer a systematic theoretical
account with predictive value for news content and reporting. There have been
few attempts at such explanatory–predictive modelling across communications
studies. The trade-off between such modelling and microanalysis is not just
between reductiveness and sophistication, but also between connectedness and
contingency. As predicted by Herman and Chomsky various forms of liberal
criticism are predicated on a disavowal of the strong relationship between media